China placed its yellow star flag on the moon more than 50 years after the United States first raised the star-striped flag.
Images from the China National Space Administration show the five-star red flag, which will stand on the surface of the moon from now on. The position was recorded by the Chang’o-5 spacecraft’s camera before it left the moon on Thursday laden with rock samples. On two previous Chinese missions to the Moon, they were not yet able to display flags using robot technology, and this is now possible for the first time. This is also the reason why the American flag was placed only by human hands on the surface of the moon.
In 1969, the United States placed the first flag on the Moon during the Apollo 11 mission. Until the end of the Apollo program in 1972, five more American flags were placed on the lunar surface during other missions. Between 1958 and 1976, the Soviet Union successfully landed on the moon with its probes 15 times, and even a possible Mars car was tested on the celestial body during the Lunokhod program, but since the Soviet cosmonaut did not land on the celestial body, the flag was not placed.
In 2012, five of the flags were still standing, according to NASA satellite images, but experts say sunlight has likely bleached them since then. The first and most famous science is not among them, because astronaut Buzz Aldrin said it was very close to the Apollo lunar module, so it probably burned up when the module took off from the moon. According to a Chinese news agency,Breaking the flag is a reminder of the excitement and inspiration of the American Apollo missions. The cloth flag now revealed by Chang’o-5’s robot has been placed before being reloaded back into the Inner Mongolian desert, laden with soil and rock samples.
The Chinese flag is 2 meters wide, 90 centimeters high and weighs about 1 kilogram. Project leader Li Yunfeng told China’s Global Times that the science had been subjected to chemical processes to make it resistant to light and heat so that it could decorate the moon as long as possible. “An ordinary national flag used on Earth will not withstand the lunar environmentDevelopment engineer Cheng Chang said. China’s national flag was depicted on the moon as early as its first lunar landing, but it was just a picture of a flag drawn on the side of the probe. Robots have now made it possible to perform such a complex operation, making it the first non-human science manually implanted on an Earth-orbiting orb.
(BBC)
